


Tenerife Sea

by collectingstories



Series: Connor Murphy shorts [3]
Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Adorable Connor, Autistic Reader, Awkward Flirting, Awkward Kissing, Connor Deserves Happiness, F/M, striped shirts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 07:00:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21295424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/collectingstories/pseuds/collectingstories
Summary: Connor realizes he has a crush.
Relationships: Connor Murphy (Dear Evan Hansen)/Reader
Series: Connor Murphy shorts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1535135
Kudos: 48





	Tenerife Sea

**Author's Note:**

> This was partially inspired by Tenerife Sea by Ed Sheeran and partially by If I Could Tell Her from Dear Evan Hansen.

He didn’t care. Or so he told himself. It wasn’t that he cared, it was just that he was curious. He’d been seeing you every day at school since 6th grade when the elementary school’s merged to the middle school and he was stuck sitting behind you in home room. However it worked out in computer systems or principal’s heads you were always in the same home room and you were always sitting in front of him. Like some assigned algorithm and not just a random chance that kept occurring the same way over and over. Did you know you always sat in front of him. Whether he really thought about it enough to analyze the feeling he was sure that he liked you sitting in front of him. So much so that as you slid into the seat in front of him that first morning of senior year he almost felt himself exhale all the negative energy that had been clogging his lungs like smoke. 

You always wore your hair the same way, since sixth grade. And you had some variation of the same plastic, blush pink rimmed glasses. They only changed minutely when the prescription needed to be altered. And you always wore stripes. You must’ve had a million striped shirts in all different colours and sizes. Some skinny stripes, some fat, some were pastel in color and others just plain black. He thought about your striped shirts a lot. But he didn’t care. You could wear what you wanted, it was your body. If you liked stripes who was he to judge. Who would care if he did. 

“Hi Connor, how was your summer?” You always greeted him too. 

He liked the greeting best after breaks or on a Monday, because you always asked what he did while you didn’t see him. As if you were friends and you wanted to genuinely know how he was. 

But it was his secret and he couldn’t let you in on it, “fine.” 

“That’s good,” and sometimes you would let the subject drop and start pulling out the perfectly organized binder and notebook that you always had on hand along with a pencil case crammed with color coded pens and highlighters. Once you lent him a pastel green pen because you only had one black and it was still sitting on his nightstand in his room. Like some cherished gift from a friend. 

After home room most of your classes didn’t line up. And four days out of five you had study hall at the end of the day. The school called it senior privilege and told the kids they could leave early if they maintained good grades and didn’t have an excess of absences. They didn’t dare align Connor’s classes so that he could get off early. By senior year they knew him too well. Even without the okay he rarely stuck around for the entire day. The first week in and he was cutting out early. 

“Hey Connor,” a week in and you were still greeting him everyday, “you weren’t in science so I got the homework for you.” This was the other thing you did, Connor noted. You always gave him homework when he was out. The year he flipped out on the home room teacher and shoved his desk to the ground he got suspended for a week and you had volunteered (though he was sure they assigned you) to pick up his homework everyday. 

“Yeah, thanks.” But he didn’t try to take it so you left it on the desk. 

Two weeks in and you were wearing a plain gray sweater with jeans. He felt jittery that morning, like he couldn’t relax the right way and he spent the thirty minutes of home room shifting uncomfortably in his seat trying to determine why he felt so anxious. When he saw you later the gray sweater was stuffed in your locker and a gray and white striped shirt was on you. He could catch his breath, he felt himself relax. 

Three weeks in, sitting outside the office as the principal finished a meeting with his parents he saw you leaving the nurses office. 

“Hey,” he called for you and when you turned around you had the most shocked expression on your face. To be fair you always talked to Connor but he never talked to you first. When he did speak to you it was just one or two words, nothing monumental. 

“Yeah?” 

“You alright?” He noticed the stripes peeking out from beneath your gray sweater. 

“Oh yeah, just a migraine.” You replied. “Are you in trouble?” When you whispered the last part he wanted to laugh. You sounded like a kindergartener afraid an adult would overhear you. 

He shrugged. He was always in trouble. This time he’d gotten into it with the English teacher. Last week he’d gotten into a fight with another kid. It just depended he supposed. 

“Well it’s not weed but here,” you produced a lollipop, a cotton candy dum-dum to be exact, from your backpack and offered it to him, “makes me feel better when I’m anxious.” 

“I’m not.” He replied. Now he really did feel like he was in elementary school. 

“Yeah, no, I just mean, it might help you calm down.” 

“I don’t need to calm down. I’m perfectly calm.” 

“Okay,” you nodded and he thought for the first time you looked far more upset than he’d ever seen you. “I’ll see you in science?” 

“Probably not.” 

“I’ll get your homework then.” 

“Don’t bother.” 

That Monday you only smiled at him but didn’t say hello and didn’t ask how his weekend was. You went to the nurse’s office right after home room and then when he saw you again at lunch you were reading by yourself at the end of a table. Were you always by yourself? He couldn’t remember if he’d ever noticed before. The rest of the week was the same and he felt like all he could concentrate on was where you were. In class, in the hallway, in the lunch room. By Friday he realized that you might have less friends than he did, at least he had Evan sometimes. 

When the week started over you didn’t sit in front of him in home room and he found himself searching for the striped shirt in the hallway. You were absent Tuesday and Wednesday and when you came back on Thursday you looked tired. Did you always look so tired? 

“Hey,” Connor caught you leaving the school for senior privilege, stopping you in the parking lot. 

“Oh, Connor, hi.” You smiled. 

“Are you alright?” He asked, glancing back at the school building and then you again, “I saw you in the nurses office.” 

“I had a migraine.” 

Connor wanted to kick himself for not being more eloquent, “you get those a lot.” 

You shrugged, “school makes me anxious sometimes. Hey, sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.” 

“You didn’t.” He assured, “I was just having a shitty day.” 

“Do you have senior privilege?” 

He shook his head and almost smiled when he watched your eyes get wide. “You shouldn’t be out here, you could get in trouble. Did you drive to school?”

“Walked.”

“Well you could come to my house? My mom should be home but she won’t mind,” you had already begun to walk in the direction of your house, “she’s always bugging me to bring friends over.” 

“I don’t really think we’re friends.” Connor pointed out. 

“No, yeah, right, of course. I just mean, you know. Well you don’t have to come over obviously, it’s whatever. You know?” Your words tumbled out and he noted the same disappointed expression as when he wouldn’t take the lollipop you offered up. 

He wanted to apologise, to rewind and not tell you that he wasn’t your friend cause you seemed so bothered that he wasn’t. “I don’t have anything else better to do.” A harsher phrase but he wasn’t exactly good at conveying feelings to others. 

Your house was nice, it was clean inside and you offered Connor a water bottle before leading him upstairs to your bedroom. He wondered what the chances were of you letting him smoke in your house. There were three cats and the one you picked up the moment you had your shoes off and carried like a baby all the way up to your bedroom. When you got up to go the bathroom Connor couldn’t help taking a peek in your dresser. 

“What are you doing?” You were standing in the open doorway, frown set as you stared at Connor. He still had his hand on the drawer handle. 

“Sorry,” he shut the drawer and took a step back, “you wear a lot of stripes.” 

“I like stripes.” 

“I could tell.” 

“I didn’t invite you over so you could make fun of me Connor.” You had been trying for much longer than it was worth to get Connor Murphy to be your friend. You’d made every effort to talk to him, to be nice to him, and it always felt like you were just missing the mark. You’d been more excited than you should’ve when he agreed to come over and you were hurt that he was only here to rifle through your stuff. 

“I’m not making fun of you.” Connor assured, hands raised in surrender. “I like stripes.” 

You eyed him sceptically. 

Connor was telling the truth though. He did like stripes and blush pink glasses and the way you cut your hair and coloured pens and lollipops that tasted like cotton candy. He liked your gray sweater and that you never wore any polish on your nails or any make up at all and that you told him funny stories about your weekends. He liked those jeans with the hole in the knee and your Birkenstock’s with wool socks in the winter no matter how many times they told you open footwear wasn’t allowed. 

And for the first time in his life he took Evan’s advice and didn’t try to hide behind a sarcastic comment, “I like when you wear stripes.” 

“Oh,” you felt your face grow warm at the admission, “uh, thank you?”

Connor smiled and moved closer to you, “I wasn’t trying to be an ass to you, I just wasn’t sure how to…what to say.” 

“What?” You bit your lip, skin prickling with goosebumps as he closed the distance between the two of you. “What do you mean?” 

You’d liked Connor Murphy since you first laid eyes on him in sixth grade. Eleven years old and your heart was pounding because he was the cutest boy you’d ever seen. And he wasn’t always nice but he’d always been nice to you. Your attempts at friendship had been null but you liked talking to him and he’d never complained about it until now. 

“I was just trying to…I though pushing you away would be better.”

“Why?” 

Connor’s hands were shaking, this was the most open he’d been in long time without raising his voice or losing his temper. The first time he was purposely telling someone something and still the words wouldn’t come out. “You know why.” 

You looked like you understood, there was that brief flicker of something that suggested you knew what he meant, what he couldn’t say, but it disappeared in an instant. You looked at him with the same sort of surprised expression you had when he had spoken to you in the hallway. As if it was so unreal that he would think about you and somehow it irritated him that you could even entertain the idea that he didn’t spend every waking minute thinking of you. That he hadn’t bought a pair of striped socks, which he was wearing at this very moment, because they made him think of you. 

“I don’t-“ you tried to form a coherent sentence but Connor’s hands were suddenly on either side of your face and he was leaning in and his lips pressed against yours and you could feel his thumb brush your cheek, smearing a nervous tear. 

You kissed him back almost immediately, as if it was an instinct that your body was just waiting to acknowledge. You reached for his shirt, trying to pull him closer to you than he already was, desperate to feel him. It was a good kind of sensory overload where you were both certain that you saw stars when you closed your eyes. 

You were the first to break the kiss, the sound of footsteps on the stairwell had you pushing him away. “My mom!” 

Connor brushed his hair back, neck and face red with warmth from actually kissing you. He couldn’t stop smiling, not even when your mom appeared in the open doorway. 

“Oh hi, you didn’t say you were having anyone over.” She looked pleasant enough and Connor suddenly felt very self-conscious. She’d probably call all the other moms in the neighbourhood and they would rat him out. Warn her against letting her kid be alone with Connor Murphy, the psycho freak. 

“Uh, mom this is Connor.” You waved between them nervously. You’d already unloaded so much about Connor on your mom you could only pray she didn’t embarrass you. 

“The Connor? How nice to meet you,” she grinned, that sort of knowing smile that only mother’s had, “keep the door open.” And then she was gone, headed down the hallway to her own room. 

You turned back to look at him and both spoke at the same time “Sorry,” “I should get going.” 

“No wait,” you held your hands up, as if you could physically keep him in your room, “just, we can hang out, she doesn’t care. She’s just being weird cause I always talk about you.” 

“You always talk about me?” He couldn’t help the grin. You always talked about him? What kinds of things did you notice about him? 

“I mean…like, not in a creepy way or anything, just like. Oh god, I just kissed you I can’t even talk to you.” 

“You sound like Evan.”

“That’s not helping.” You groaned. You fell onto your bed, covering your face with your hands. 

“I don’t exactly talk to my parents but I certainly think about you all the time.” He admitted, if only to see that smile again. 

You slowly uncovered your face, looking up at him through more nervous tears. “Really?” 

“Yeah,” he came over and sat next to you. “You and your five million striped shirts.” 

“Shut up,” your laugh turned into a squeal when he leaned over and pressed his lips against your neck.


End file.
